Non-negotiables in My Digital Personal Space

I wrote this post for a prompt given during our local Indieweb club meeting: “Write about non-negotiables in your personal space.” My MacBook Pro is my digital personal space on which I spend hours every day. Absence of some particular tools and capabilities is a deal breaker for me now, even if I switch to a different laptop or OS. First, I require a tiling window manager to use anything at all on my laptop. I don’t want to bother with moving windows around, fixing overlaps, changing their sizes etc. The window manager should do these for me and should be drivable by keyboard shortcuts. Currently I use Amethyst on macOS. Next, I want to configure my machine programmatically instead of going around tweaking hundreds of knobs. Not only is it cumbersome, but fairly non-reproducible too. Another reason I want this is to be able to easily move my configurations over time to newer machines I get. Currently I use nix-darwin and home-manager for this purpose. Since I write a lot of text…